Came here and noticed that ~70% of the comments were about, or replies to comments about, the imperial measurements.
Just goes to show how you can so quickly alienate your audience and derail any conversation if you don't localise the product (or in this case, de-localise).
I think this is akin to posting a link to a page in a language that is not English. Surely there would be many comments reflecting the users' annoyance of having to use Google translate to read the page; no matter 'who' is sleeping or awake.
That being said, a single upvoted comment on the matter should be enough to make the OP aware.
That's the general trend I noticed on reddit. Comments about imperial/metric units are either upvoted or downvoted depending on the time (sometimes topic). Maybe HN isn't as bad. And I have to agree that one post would be enough (and comments about using search engines are not necessary).
Yes, first thing i thought about. I sadly never learn to have a simple conversion baseline between these two, even if i travel a lot between the different continents.
One pound is half a kilogram, three feet is a meter[1], one inch is the size of my thumb. No, they're not precise, but it's easy enough to memorize, close enough to understand a text. (I also use one mile=2km but I have the notion the error on that one is huge, although I never remember if it is actually 1.8km or 1.6km)
For Fahrenheit, I never managed to memorize a conversion rule. Weatherwise 0 is friggin' cold, 100 is friggin' hot seems to be enough for daily consumption.
[1] Actually, my mnemonic is that I measure 6ft (1.82m), but I don't think my mnemonic is useful for anyone else.
For a relatively accurate guess to go from miles->kilometres you can use the fibonacci series. If the current number is in miles, the next one will be the same distance in kilometres. Works from 2 onwards.
So from 2 3 5 8 13 21 ... you can see that 3 miles is 5 kilometres, 8 miles is 13 kilometres etc.
Fahrenheit is pretty easy. The key temps are 30, 60, 90:
-30 is dangerous, hibernate.
0 is frigid, wear a thick coat and warm pants.
30 is cold, wear a coat. (freezing point of water)
60 is cool, wear clothes.
90 is hot, no clothes.
120 is roasting, God help you. (melting point of humans)
Bonus Temps:
72 is room temp.
78 is time to wear shorts.
48 is time to wear shorts in cold regions*.
* That is, in any place where people don't understand why finding outlets to plug in electric cars is a problem. Sure, you can't currently plug them in at the store, but your garage has power. What's that you say? Well, of course many people live in apartments and don't have garages, but they can just use the outlets in the parking lot. What, you don't have outlets in your parking lot? Well where do you plug in your gas powered car? You know, for the heater? To warm it up enough to start when it's 30 below? What tropical island do you live on?
Set the sliders to a range around your own height and weight. You will be shown pictures of people who are within the height range, and have (at least at one time) had a weight within the weight range.
This looks exclusively focused on fat people losing weight? I was kinda hoping to see what I would look like if I put on another 5kgs of lean muscle and reduced body fat by another 2%.
A question for the site author: I'm working on an idea that involves user uploaded photos of themselves; however, I'm wondering how you get an initial "batch" of photos. Clearly, I'm not going to use anyone's photos without permission, but how do you get roughly 50-100 photos to start with? Just contact people and ask? A stock photo website would be even better if I knew one that I could just pay for portraits of a variety of people.
Site states on front page:
"the accuracy of the data on this site is limited to the accuracy of the user-submitted data on reddit.com and the automated scraping of that data" - apparently scraped from subreddits r/loseit and r/progresspics
This particular site seems to be scraping reddit for images so asking the site creator about using photos not without permission might be slightly off.
I can, I just don't care enough to know the ratio between kilograms and pounds, and metres and feet - both pounds and feet are so exotic in my country you only hear about them on the TV sometimes so I do not bother my head with those units.
It's not about the effort. It's about the fact that I disagree with websites using units that the majority of the planet doesn't use. Just like some websites use Fahrenheit units,despite them being used by literally 3 countries out of over 120+ we have on Earth. That's what standards are invented for,and we should keep to them.
The US doesn't follow these standards, so using metric units would alienate the majority of this website's user base.
The developer is following the standards and customs of the country he or she lives in. Do you also disagree when a Chinese developer doesn't use English for a website?
It might make sense to have a toggle switch, but then again maybe 95% of the user base is from the US and the developer didn't think the extra effort was worth it.
> The developer is following the standards and customs of the country he or she lives in. Do you also disagree when a Chinese developer doesn't use English for a website?
I would gently remind that Chinese developer that internationalisation is important if they want to get an audience.
There are plenty of use cases were the localization efforts won't justify the returns. Like the case where a single developer is working on a weekend project. I run several websites that are English only because I lack the resources and motivation to run an international business right now. There are also plenty of successful Chinese only websites.
The website we're talking about doesn't even have any ads, it looks like a side project, not a business venture. Yet, half the comments on this thread are outright demanding he support their specific needs. Maybe he thinks 300 million Americans is a large enough audience, and he's not willing to put in any more work.
But then we are leaving comments on HN, not on his website. And HN has a much larger non-US audience(than his website), so if something gets to the front site we would also like to enjoy it. I think we would complain just as loud if the top link on HN was in German or French .
I'll happily agree that some of the HN comments are rude and dickish.
> I run several websites that are English only because I lack the resources and motivation to run an international business right now. There are also plenty of successful Chinese only websites.
Adding support for other languages is a lot more work than adding in support for correct weight and height units.
Pretty much entire engineering industry in the US uses metric units, so this is what counts. I am actually surprised that a web programmer would use imperial units on their website.
The vast majority of people in the US, engineers or not, do not know their height and weight in metric units without converting.
Nothing here regarding height and weight is ever metric, and there is no reason to think the average programmer ever uses the metric system day to day.
Once I started to play around with the sliders, I completely lost the ability to use the browser's back button. I had to retype news.ycombinator.com to get back to post this comment.
Just a personal pet peeve: almost all apps are targeted for weight loss. I really wish apps would start considering people wanting to gain weight.
I started using MyFitnessPal to keep track of calories and although I set my goal as weight gain, it tells me I'm doing great when I'm 500 calories under my target for the day/week.
Wow, that's really amusing to mess around with. However their method for sourcing the data isn't quite perfect. Messing with the height option to get the tallest few women returns a few men (or possibly very manly women?). Regardless, it's more than good enough to be useful.
Just when i thought i had the perfect idea that nobody thought of as of yet :(.I just started almost identical side project 3 days ago, same idea utilizing sub-reddits and other websites.
I "found" this on reddit and think it's pretty neat. The creator spoke up in that thread and I try to point him to this thread so he can see the suggestions.
With that kind of reasoning I could post in Russian and if you complain that you don't understand I would retort that you just need to translate my comments...
At least the US is consistent. In the UK we use a weird mix of different things - short distances are metric (centimetres, metres), long distances are imperial (miles). Temperatures are in both depending largely on the age of the person talking. Vehicle speed is entirely in imperial (mph). Area is in metric for small things (wallpaper is meters^2), imperial for big things (fields are in acres). And so on.
At least the UK converted to the world standard. Of course these things take time. Of course older people (who have been used to the imperial standard for decades) will have a harder time converting. That's normal.
But the UK did it/tries. The US doesn't even bother. Their attempt back in the 70s/80s was half-hearted at best. And then they just gave up.
The UK conversion was only really done because it's an EU requirement, some people are still unhappy with it, and the vernacular is still using the Imperial measurements. Fortunately the scientific community gave up on the foot-pound-second system and has switched. But we're still using plenty of connectors based on 0.1inch spacing, and PCBs designed in "mils" (thousandths of an inch).
(In Orwell's 1984, he makes a point of having a bystander in a pub complaining about beer being served in liters. Just another symbol of dystopia. Some people still think like that.)
> Temperatures are in both depending largely on the age of the person talking
The biggest argument for metric for length and mass is the uniform way of making larger and smaller units. If you need to cover 1875 square centimeters with something that is priced by the square meter, the conversion is going to be a multiplication or division by a power of 10. Figuring out how many square yards you need to buy to cover 1875 square inches is much more annoying.
There is no such argument for temperature. For both C and F, we use a decimal system to get units smaller or larger than a degree. The only advantage C has is that a difference of 1 degree C = 1 Kelvin, so converting between C and K just requires addition or subtraction of an ugly number (273.15). Converting between F and either C or K requires both a multiplication or division (by 1.8) and an addition or subtraction.
F, on the other hand, has the advantage of a smaller degree (1 degree C = 1.8 degree F), giving us a finer scale when we are sticking to integers.
The F scale and choice of reference points aligns it very nicely with the weather. 0 F to 100 F is pretty much the range that a world traveller will encounter as they visit various major cities. In C, that's -18 C to 38 C.
The most sensible system would be to use metric for length and mass, F for temperature when you don't need your 0 point set to absolute 0, and a Kelvin like scale where 1 K = 1 degree F instead of 1 degree C when you do need the 0 point to be absolute 0.
F is more convenient for measuring the weather, but C is more convenient for cooking (0-100 freezing-boiling), and cooking is arguably a more important application than measuring the weather.
The Daily Express routinely uses Fahrenheit when reporting heatwaves or blizzards on the front page - most of the other UK tabloids rarely have a weather focused front page.
Precisely. A really hot day sounds more impressive when you say 82 Fahrenheit, rather than 28 Celsius. Similarly, you get down into the negative numbers way sooner with Celsius (since freezing is 0, rather than 32).
Just makes for better headlines, although almost everyone uses C now.
Just goes to show how you can so quickly alienate your audience and derail any conversation if you don't localise the product (or in this case, de-localise).